We had the good fortune of connecting with Megan Prazenica and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Megan, how do you think about risk?
I’m from small-town western Pennsylvania, so moving to Los Angeles after college was a huge risk, personally and financially. But I knew I had to do it to pursue my animation dreams. I moved to LA in late 2008 and it was love at first sight. I never looked back.

Since then, I’ve had the honor of working on shows like South Park, BoJack Horseman, and Tuca & Bertie. I started out as an animator, which led me to storyboarding, which led me to assistant directing… and then directing! In 2022, I directed three episodes of Praise Petey, created by the hilarious Anna Drezen.

But like a lot of artists, I think the reason we get into creative work is because we want to tell our own stories. In 2023, my longtime writing partner Megan Kemp-Gee and I released our debut graphic novel, One More Year. One More Year is a sports-comedy. In the tradition of Ted Lasso or The Mighty Ducks, it’s about a team of losers and misfits chasing an unlikely dream: winning the National Championships of beach ultimate frisbee!

The whole project was a bit of an unlikely dream… It took us four years to finish One More Year! But now that we can hold the book in our hands, it was all worth it. In 2023, we launched a successful Kickstarter campaign, and are now in the process of distributing the book worldwide.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
One of the unique things about me is that I am equal parts jock and artist. In high school, I’d spend the whole morning running around at basketball camp and then the whole afternoon drawing cartoons in my room. It was a good balance: the discipline and work ethic from sports paired with creativity and storytelling of art. It’s a combination I use in my career every day.

But sometimes that “athlete” mentality doesn’t translate perfectly into art. Athletic solutions like “work harder, get stronger, get faster” don’t always translate to creative success. The book Mindset, by Carol Dwek completely changed the way I approached art and work. “Growth-mindset” gave me permission to fail, to grow, to improve. I embraced the idea that truly mastering something takes time. I started writing mini-comics and I gave myself permission to let my style, storytelling, and voice develop over time. My writing partner Meghan and I honed our writing process over many years. Our graphic novel, One More Year, is the culmination of that process.

One More Year is the perfect blend of my love of sports and comics. While it centers around the niche sport of ultimate frisbee, like most sports comedies, you don’t have to love the sport itself to see yourself in the story. These are universal themes: wanting to win, overcoming loss, and loving something or someone that doesn’t love you back.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Oh wow… I think this truly depends on the friend who’s visiting. One of the great things about Los Angeles is that it has EVERYTHING, from art to nature to sports to shows to food. A perfect Saturday for me would involve going to Main Street Santa Monica, grabbing coffee and a breakfast burrito, and then walking over to South Beach Park. Some of my happiest times in LA are playing beach ultimate frisbee here. Next, I’d hop on a bicycle and ride over to Abbot-Kinney in Venice to explore the food and shops. It’s great for people-watching, too! From Venice, you can ride south and catch the bike path all the way to the South Bay. But I like taking the Ballona Creek trail east into Culver City and checking out some of the weird architecture in the Hayden Tract. For the evening, I would get ramen in DTLA’s Little Tokyo and then get a group together for karaoke in one of the private rooms! And that’s just one day!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I work alongside so many amazing people and artists every day, I wish I could shout them all out! I think my biggest shout-out would go to Amy Winfrey (@the_amy_winfrey). I met Amy at a networking event in 2017, when she was a director on BoJack Horseman. This sounds silly now, but at the time I didn’t even know women could get director positions in adult animation. I was still an animator at South Park, the same place Amy had started her career! For the first time, I saw a path to directing that was possible for me. I made it my mission to pursue that path. A year later I was working on BoJack with Amy as my director. Five years later, I got my first opportunity to direct.

Besides being an amazing artist, I love Amy’s leadership style. She’s calm, thoughtful, and universally respected by everyone who works for her. In addition, her independent projects outside of studio work (Making Fiends, Hooray for Hell) are inspiring and uniquely Amy. I attribute a lot of the opportunities I have today to artists like her.

Website: meganpraz.com

Instagram: @meganpraz (personal) @contestedstrip (comic)

Other: LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/contestedstrip One More Year Pre-Order form: https://forms.gle/wmogvCqhQXRt5Sdx9

Image Credits
Frisbee Photo Credit: William “Brody” Brotman via Ultiphotos.com BoJackHorseman Photo: Featuring Alex Salyer Photo #6: Featuring Meghan Kemp-Gee, photo credit James Lumsden

Nominate Someone: ShoutoutLA is built on recommendations and shoutouts from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.